John Newton's thoughts, ideas and opinions on content management, enterprise software and open source.

5 posts from July 2005

2005.07.07

The explosions on the London underground took us all by surprise this morning. People started phoning in almost as soon as it happened to make sure that someone they knew wasn't involved. We are all safe since we were all slaving away in the office. Fortunately, so far, all our friends and neighbors are okay.

I have travelled often through the all the underground stations that were struck in the last couple of years. In fact, we had an office right next to Liverpool Station where most of the people died. It's no coincidence, since we were trying to be close to the major banks of London, just as the terrorists were. UBS, with more money than any other company in the world, was right across the street.

The BBC had filmed a docudrama about a potential terrorist attack right in that very spot. The scenario was different, but the target was the same. The money in London and the people who work the money. But you look around Liverpool Street, most of the people are anything but. They are just people doing a job. Yes, they work in banks, but that doesn't mean they own the money.

The morale of the BBC story and the message that the police have been communicating for some time was not "if", but "when?" There are times when you can't help feel, while travelling on the underground, whether something is going to happen. The probabilities are so low, you just have to forget it, but you know it can happen.

Regardless of politics, everyone knows that the people who were killed or injured today did not deserve it. I was really struck watching television today about how people were planning on going back to work tomorrow to show that they would not be deterred. The bus driver who said that they would all be back to work tomorrow reminded me of the grit and determination during the Blitz of WWII. Even the twisted metal of the double decker bus reminded me of something out of the war. And just in the war, it may well be a galvinizing force, rather than a deterrent. This is also a city that has lived through two decades of terrorist violence without giving in.

The trips home this evening were horrendous and I'm sure tomorrow won't be a cake walk. Traffic diverted from London and out of the clogged motorways were funneled through Maidenhead in the evening only to be stopped by the roadworks right in front of our office. I've heard of stories of people walking out of London, sharing rides and just giving up on their cars. With the tube out, we can expect a lot of disruption in at least the near term and extreme suspicion over the coming months.

Given a day that should have been filled with news about poverty in Africa and global warming, this is about the stupidest thing that could have happened. I hope that when the people of London show that it won't make a difference and that life goes on, will the people who carried this out see how futile their efforts are.

2005.07.01

JSF is everywhere! It is very popular and now seems accepted as the standard for UI development in Java. That is very clear here from JavaOne. We are very glad we made the decision to use this as the basis of our user interface.

We went to the presentation "Shale, The Next Struts?" by Craig McClanahan who designed Struts and was spec co-lead on JSF. What Shale is, is really the next JSF. (BTW, Craig after the presentation said, "Alfresco, what a great name!" Thanks, Craig!)

Shale is a set of extensions that is a playground of some of the ideas that will go into JSF 2.It adds capabilities such as support for tapestry like views (ui designer to develop html screens to hook in = run in html mode or run time mode so that ui designer can )

Shale also added capabilities to do wizards and multistep dialogs. There is talk of Ajax support which would provide a more interactive ui. Sort of a rich client over the web - same as the Microsoft SmartClient concept.

We also went to the JSF Components session. They mentioned that many of them can be found at JSFCentral and that it is great resource for more components. Some of the components look fun to use. ESRI presented some map and 3D components. Imagine Google maps in your application. Business Objects had some great BI tools from the Crystal guys. We don't know how tied they are to the BO interface though.

Craig presented some components for breadcrumbs, grids and tabs. Many of which we have already used or implemented ourselves. Still they look great. We like the theming that they added.

We don't like the term "Soh-Ah" as the pronunciation of S-O-A. And we liked even less what was being presented.

Every single Sonic presentation ended up being self-promotion, the worst of which was the ESB-Java and .NET. We came looking for real insight on Java-.NET integration (which we intend to do) and all we got was another Sonic advert. He should have heard the audience (not me) mutter, "Get to the demo!"

The whole model of JBI being the glue that builds a SOA architecture, just doesn't seem right. Instead of composite services, perhaps the Java community should start looking at composite applications. That's what we need to do. Components of applications interacting with diverse services.

It seems to us that BPEL solves all our problems of coordination of services as well as exception handling. This is a good basis of complex workflows (or at least good enough).

We went to the Oracle presentation of their BPEL engine (the old Collaxa engine) called "Five Ways to Use BPEL". They used the Collaxa editor in JDeveloper 10g which was really cool. We are going to use the patterns presented in this talk in our complex workflows. Examples will be for review and approval or perhaps translation that may occur as an external service.

We have always felt that the Collaxa product was one of, if not _the_ best BPEL products. We used it working in an Eclipse environment. We'd like to see the open source community match the quality of this product. (Come-on ActiveEndpoints, drop the dual license and go LGPL.) and have it work in Eclipse.

Then we would have a truly flexible, adaptable open source Service Oriented Architecture.

JMX looks like it is heading in the right direction to standardize administration of systems, including Alfresco. Java SE 5 already has a more rational way of accessing and setting information through a container interface that combines local and remote access. Mustang will see the introduction of a standard console. More importantly, Mustang will present system information as composite data objects to handle more complex information. There are better observation patterns that they are presenting for tracking events and alerts in systems.

Dolphin (Java SE 7) will see a convergence of Java administration with web services administration and take advantage of all the services, including security, that are provided by web services. These are being tracked in JSR-255 and JSR-262.

We have to ask the question though. There are lots of standards for generalized data access, including realtime data access. Look how Micromuse used SQL to query network state. Why can't they just build an adaptor interface (jdbc or jbi) that conformed to one of those data access standards?

A great idea that they are considering in the Dolphin time frame is to use RSS to avoid the complexities of a push protocol over web services. There is no reason why we can present system alerts as RSS in Alfresco now!

We were quite surprised by Bill Burke's presentation of the JBoss kernel and the capabilities of that system. JBoss kernel is fundamentally neat component-oriented architecture that is self-contained and supports hot deployment of components. It has the notion of pluggable deployers which keep track of source Urls and if a component is placed in the Url location, the deployer will pick it up and

One of the deployers is a spring deployer. We might be able to use it to hot deploy spring components if we can mix and match the jboss kernel and spring ioc container.

Bill didn't mention anything about AOP. However, there was a notion of an interceptor. when a client makes a call on a component it can call one of these hot deployed components.

It would be nice to have this in Alfresco so that we can hot deploy new services and aspects. There are hints that Spring will go this way as well. They will provide custom xml descriptors in spring and Rod Johnson mentioned that they will be able to register beans at run-time. This does not necessarily mean hot deploy, but he might go this way.

All the components can be registered through JMX. There is a management console so you can interrogate the state of the kernel and set up alerts so that if certain limits are reached, you can be notified.

Having seen the JBI discussions, the architecture of the kernel is very similar to JBI in that you can register services and support multiple protocols through service invocation. They will probably support JBI soon.

On a side note, Gavin King's Hibernate 3 presentation was not very good. He has had a lot of influence on EJB3 according to Laura De Michiel, but that doesn't mean that he can present well. We didn't get anything out of it. EJB3 support will be interchangeable with Hibernate as EJB3 will be implemented as a facade on the Hibernate core. Hibernate still provides more mapping capabilities and we will probably stick with it directly.